Friday, November 03, 2006

Computer science is at a turning point, and it has to go beyond algorithms and understand the social dynamics of issues like trust, responsibility, empathy and privacy in this vast networked space.

Ben Shneiderman, a professor at the University of Maryland, commenting on an announcement by MIT and the University of Southampton that they are launching a joint research program concerned with "Web science", as reported by the New York Times.

The article opens with a citation from web daddy Tim Berners-Lee, who will be heading the program:

The Web isn’t about what you can do with computers. It’s people and, yes, they are connected by computers. But computer science, as the study of what happens in a computer, doesn’t tell you about what happens on the Web.